Online Digital PR – The Basics

What is the idea of Digital PR?

Digital PR and digital marketing agencies focus on the online visibility of their clients’ businesses. This involves understanding Google and other search engines. This means keeping up with the ever-shifting rules of engagement in the game, because what counted as a good Digital PR strategy five years ago is now outdated and could potentially harm your rankings.

It’s no longer acceptable nor beneficial to stuff substandard articles with bloated numbers of key search terms and fool Google into ranking you more highly. These days Digital PR means generating high quality links back to a client’s website from all pieces of online content, producing high-quality, user focused think pieces that answer real perceived problems and optimising the website itself. It also involves building relationships with some key content writers to receive ‘press hits’, or citations, as well as high quality backlinks.

Creating shareable content

Understanding that good Digital PR strategy must work hand in hand with social media strategy is vital today. The more likely each piece of unique content is to be shared, the more reach it will have and the more likely it will be to increase traffic and generate leads. Of course, it should be the right sort of traffic - going in the right direction, not leading to far off lands that have nothing in common with your business.

How is this done? Well, firstly you need to understand your customer demographic. Visit likely forums, find out what they are passionate about within your industry; what confuses or troubles them and what problems they’d like to see addressed. Then use this to create shareable content such as surveys, quizzes, top 10 do’s and don’ts, lists of top tips, how to articles. All of these are eminently shareable and you can even build data and contact collection into the quizzes.

Measuring the impact of Digital PR

Of course, the endgame of any PR or marketing exercise is to boost the bottom line, but it can be tricky to quantify the financial boost that say an original piece of content in the printed (offline) media has had to the finances of your business. When it comes to the online digital world, however, almost everything is tracked, which is incredibly handy when it comes to trying to monetize the impact of content or changes to web design for instance. The value is in the data, we just need to learn to extract it.

Some ways of measuring the success of Online Digital PR include:

Using Google URL Builder to tag PR campaign links allowing you to see bounce rate, conversion data and other metrics

Making notes on PR hits in Google Analytics in order to measure spikes in referral traffic generated by PR hits.

Using such tools as Majestic SEO to monitor the backlink profile of your website. A successful Digital PR campaign should lead to additional backlinks over time.

We've been with Lojix for about 2 years. They were recommended by our web developer and he was not wrong. Having joined the Lojix team we found ourselves very quickly on Google page 1 with both Google Shop and Google Ads for just about every product we sell (over 300), and for by far the majority of our products we also feature organically on page 1 or 2 - that's even more satisfying and clearly demonstrates the sound advice and support they're able to provide website administrators. As a consequence our sales have rocketed. Lojix have a very understated approach i.e. they are not the flashy, pushy, irritating sort of SEO organisation that pester businesses every day, promising the earth but usually delivering nothing. No. Lojix just get on with the job, quietly and professionally, responding quickly to any product adjustments required or to the need to adjust bids on Ads. etc. We would wholeheartedly recommend Lojix to any business looking for an organisation that can actually deliver, and deliver without compromising your profit!